Search results for ""author daniel siemens""

On 14 January 1930, Horst Wessel, a young and ambitious member of the SA was shot at close range at his home in Berlin. Although the crime was never completely solved, the murder was most likely committed by a group of communists with close ties to the city's gangland. Wessel later died from his injuries. Joseph Goebbels, whose attention had already been drawn to Wessel as a possible future Nazi leader, was the first to recognize the propaganda potential of the case. 'A young martyr for the Third Reich' he wrote in his diary on 23 February 1930 immediately after receiving the news of Wessel's death. This was the beginning of the myth-making that transformed an ordinary individual into a masculine role model for an entire generation. Two months later, thousands of people lined the streets for Wessel's funeral parade and Goebbels delivered a graveside eulogy. In the years that followed - and as Nazi power increased - Horst Wessel became the hero of the Nazi movement - with his elaborate memorial quickly becoming a site of pilgrimage. The song Die Fahne Hoch for which Wessel had written the lyrics (and which subsequently became popularly known as the Horst Wessel Song) became the official Nazi party anthem and the Berlin district of Friedrichshain, where Wessel was murdered was renamed Horst-Wessel-Stadt in his honour. Numerous biographies and films followed. Using previously unseen material, Daniel Siemens provides a fascinating and gripping account of the background to Horst Wessel's murder and uncovers how and why the Nazis made him a political hero. He examines the Horst Wessel 'cult' which emerged in the aftermath of Wessel's death and the murders of revenge, particularly against Communists, committed by the SA and Gestapo after 1933. At the same time, the story of Horst Wessel provides a portrait of the Nazi propaganda machine at its most effective and most chilling.

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The first full history of the Nazi Stormtroopers whose muscle brought Hitler to power, with revelations concerning their longevity and their contributions to the Holocaust Germany’s Stormtroopers engaged in a vicious siege of violence that propelled the National Socialists to power in the 1930s. Known also as the SA or Brownshirts, these “ordinary” men waged a loosely structured campaign of intimidation and savagery across the nation from the 1920s to the “Night of the Long Knives” in 1934, when Chief of Staff Ernst Röhm and many other SA leaders were assassinated on Hitler’s orders. In this deeply researched history, Daniel Siemens explores not only the roots of the SA and its swift decapitation but also its previously unrecognized transformation into a million-member Nazi organization, its activities in German-occupied territories during World War II, and its particular contributions to the Holocaust. The author provides portraits of individual members and their victims and examines their milieu, culture, and ideology. His book tells the long-overdue story of the SA and its devastating impact on German citizens and the fate of their country.

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